Our methods of governance are shifting. We increasingly rely on an interconnected web of public, private, and nonprofit actors working across organizational, institutional, and sectoral boundaries to deliver public services. Our understanding of these new practices, however, is reliant on models of individual rationality and social behavior developed for hierarchical organizational forms. I argue that collectivist models of decentralized, self-organizing social forms may advance our understanding of modern governance practices and balance tensions in three areas: perspectives on organizations (structure or process), between individual liberty and collective responsibility, and whether increasing freedom or control over individuals enhances organizational efficiencies.